Managing Your Content in a Nimble World #smartcontent

With a morning filled with keynotes and lightning talks, the Smart Content Conference reconvened after lunch to take on more semantic content-related initiatives. Content strategist extraordinaire, Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish asked us to Imagine a Nimble World: Challenging the Publishing Industry.

Set Your Content Free

The first step in creating a nimble word is setting your content free. Not that it needs to be given away, but it should be available when and where it’s needed. Additionally, you cannot contain content. It doesn’t belong to a device, program or media source.

If publishing is focused on the Monetization, Engagement and Delivery of its content, it needs to know that it’s not just about making content work for you, it’s about transforming publishing and how it approaches content. Yet, in order to become more free, publishers need structure.

How to Provide Structure?

Companies can begin to provide a better infrastructure for their content through a few basic strategies to their content management:

Including markup that provides more meaning and context can add and validate formatting that supports rich text formatting. As a result semantic SEO can be enhanced, making content more findable and relevant to the user.

By adding relationship to your markup language, you can use rich data services to connect your content and data to other rich data sources.

To increase SEO Value, organizations can create one page per concept. By aggregating content it can be mapped to related data.

Related content services

There are many ways for others to generate and share content which offer a new level of flexibility for users. APIs for content, data and function are beginning to be used more in the publishing space, as NPR and New York Times have demonstrated.

However, before content can be shared, there are issues that need to be dealt with. How can it be used? Is it free? What are the issues governing usage?

What does the nimble world look like?

Lovinger describes and gives examples of a landscape paved with paid content and intuitive advertising which create additional revenue and reduce costs, all with the intent to meet users needs accurately and innately. By being nimble, publishers can sample with new business models and have the freedom to create and innovate.

It is imperative that publishers understand and harness their relationships with their audience and develop strategies accordingly, if they want to be successful in a changing and nimble landscape.